I taught for a long time in three very different high schools, one of them a highly prestigious public school in a highly prestigious community. I met very different kinds of students from all walks of life, economic conditions, and various ethnic groups. However, there was always one group of students that always intrigued me, but not necessarily for positive reasons. Most of these particular students came from, surprise, that highly prestigious and competitive high school from that highly prestigious and competitive community. I called them “excellent sheep”.
They took as many AP courses as they could accumulate without any love of the subjects. They did all the same extracurriculars. They were tutored to get the highest SAT scores possible. They either had coaches or had “ghost”writers help them write their college essays They had all figured out how to play the academic game of success without taking risks but many couldn’t do simple tasks like get on a commuter train to NYC. These students were the epitome of a saying one of my “regular kids” put on a t-shirt we made up one year: “Be Different. Just Like Everyone Else.” They followed the script to get the highest grades, the highest SAT scores, and to get them into the most elite universities in the country. And get in they did.
Then, while working as a Fordham University mentor with 19 TFA corps members for four years I discovered the same thing. Although more diverse than most think, several of my corps members also fit this description. From Ivies or other Ivy like colleges, they had always been top students because they had played the game by the rules, gotten top scores, and thought of themselves as “ the best and brightest”. I always asked best and brightest what? They were often the ones who had the most trouble adapting to the far less than perfect conditions in the schools to which they were assigned, and were the most rigid in following the TFA line and had the hardest time in following the more practical wisdom I was providing them based on real experience.
In fact, in one of my earliest blogs I claimed that there were many corps members who, in the spirit of extracurricular activities accumulation, saw TFA membership as a similar escapade to many of the things they did while in HS (pay to be in a program that built a school in Costa Rica) to get them into the elite college of their choice. However this time it was to get them into the graduate program or job of choice. I said of them, “They would have gone to the Peace Corps in Africa, except their mothers didn’t let them.”
Last week, I read William Deresiewicz’s, Xcellent Sheep: The Miseducation of The American Elite. The title certainly sounded familiar. It was a phrase I had used years ago. Deresiewicz taught for years at Yale, one of the top Universities in the country. I taught for 18 years at Scarsdale High School, one of the top public high schools and Yale feeder schools in the country. He wrote about the same type of students I had taught and some of the TFA corps members I had worked with who did not stay in teaching, but have put themselves on the education public policy path to become the next Arne Duncan. I was captivated by the similarities in findings he had at the University level to what I had discovered on the high school level. I would recommend it to anyone looking to see why those in our leadership class are more followers than leaders.
Deresiewicz describes them as, “smart, talented, driven, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity, and a stunted sense of purpose; trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they are doing but with no idea why they are doing it.”
What follows is a summary of some the thoughts and observations we have both made over the years. They are a sad commentary on those we call our elite and our best and brightest as well as the institutions that have created them.
We have both concluded that students have not learned how to learn. Instead they have learned how to succeed at school. They believe doing homework and getting top grades is all education is. “They have learned to ‘be a student’, not to use their minds.” They are “content to color within the lines” of direction their schools have given them. Few are passionate about ideas or “intellectual discovery” of their own choosing. They are more interested in developing credentials, what Deresiewicz describes as “credentialism”. Others might call this “meritocracy.”
“Credentialism” has lead to a narrowing scope of practical utility in education setting its sights on future success in economics, business and finance. In fact since 1993 economics went from being the top major in 3 of the top 10 universities in the country to a whopping 65% of the top 40 universities and liberal arts colleges in 2014. As a result in 2010-11 (even after the Great Recession) “nearly half of Harvard graduates”, “more than half of those at Penn,” “and more than a third of those at Cornell, Stanford, and MIT” went into two fields: Finance and Consulting! “In 2011 36% of Princeton graduates went into finance alone.” The chief not-for-profit on that path to success? TFA!
Sheep! A former Yalie writes, “My friends and I didn’t run sprinting down a thousand career paths, bound for all corners of the globe. Instead we moved cautiously, in groups, plodding down a few well worn trails….” Deresiewicz adds, “That is the situation consulting firms, especially have learned to exploit.” The “work is pretty much like college: rigorous analysis, integration of disparate forms of information, clear and effective communication. They seek “intelligence, diligence, energy—aptitude. And of course they offer you a lot of money.” Success!
Here lies the rub. Our “best and brightest students” are told the world is their oyster. They are told, often from birth, that they can be anything, do anything, and be the best at it. However, most of them simply “follow the fold” and “choose to be one be of a few similar things.” Now that unfortunately includes education reform.
How sad is it that so few choose the “path less travelled”. How sad is it that our system produces high achieving clones. To get into the elite schools (from pre-K to university and beyond) students kill themselves overworking and underplaying, parents helicopter and kill themselves paying, all in the hope of what they call opportunity.
To me it seems that we have created too many opportunity costs. The narrow paths our best “students” follow have closed off to them the passions they never had a chance to enjoy. The narrow paths have closed off the chance to teach, to work with their hands, to be a musician, or to be a stand up comedian. The pressure of having to stay within the lines and conform to the expectations of teachers, counselors, professors, parents and peers for fear of embarrassment for doing something “beneath them” has actually closed a world of possibilities and probably their true callings.
That is a shame for both them and all of us.
Our elite leaders want others to be like them. In education, they want schools to be what they knew them as. They want all public schools to be like the Scarsdale NY, Weston CT, Riverdale OR, Chappaqua NY, and Briarcliff Manor NY schools that “24/7 Wall Street” named as the wealthiest schools in the country. They like charter schools because they see them as private schools for poor kids. Why not try to spread a little Dalton or Friends Academy love?
Remember, our first Black president did not go to school at Stevenson HS in the Bronx; he attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school. Arne Duncan did not go to Dyett HS in Chicago; he went to the University of Chicago Lab School. What do they know?
The problem that they continue to ignore? It’s the economy stupid! Or in this case it is the socioeconomic status that provided the opportunities our elite had. So lets examine (again with the help of author William Deresiewicz).
They are groomed. To get into the elite universities and colleges they must be more than intelligent, well tutored, test taking sheep. They are groomed to be leaders. They can’t have just belonged to student government; they had to have been president. They had to be first violin. They had to be captain of their teams. As Deresiewicz puts it, “ You have to come across, in other words, as an oligarch in training, just like the private school boys of a century ago.”
They cant just take required courses. They can’t take courses they may be passionate about. They can’t do experiential learning (unless convinced it helps their interview process). They must take as many AP courses as possible and score as many “5”s as inhumanely possible (again with tutoring). Some even take the SAT in 7th grade to be recruited in high school.
This process has been speeding down a slippery slope for decades. The competition has grown exponentially and parents have been using nitro-injected engines to get their “race to the toppers” across the finish line first. Race To the Top was created by Harvard grads who knew what many had to do to get in. Even the name of the law smacks of the process.
But what of the excellent black sheep? Many have become the best teachers in the best schools trying to help those in the herd see a different path. Others just work as hard as they can to accelerate the shepherding into the Ivy corrals. It is hard to stay the black sheep in the high-pressure environment of these competitive schools as a teacher, counselor, parent, and especially student. Crazy begets crazy as many will attest to. Deresiewicz tells us the following:
- Parents refuse “to allow their children to go on a field trip, because they couldn’t afford to lose a day of academics” – with “a lot of kids agreeing with them.”
- “It doesn’t matter if your parents aren’t crazy…because the environment is. Other people’s parents are crazy, so the whole school is crazy.”
- Most “teachers are trapped in the system.” As their schools “ give the parents what they want, no matter what’s good for the kids.”
Here is the upshot of all of this. These elite public and private schools have been, for generations, producing students who grow up to be corporate and political leaders “constructed with a single goal in mind.” Sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens describes it thusly, “Affluent families fashion an entire way of life of life organized around measurable virtues of children.” “They are not simply teaching to the test, they live it.”
What of their personality traits? William Wordsworth’s famous line, “The child is the father of the man,” says a lot about who we grow up to become. They become what they were made to be in their childhood (which now extends into extended adolescence). Alice Miller tells us in The Drama of the Gifted Child that many parents have made perfection the goal (see Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) with the following results. Their child gives them what they want…or tries. The demand is constant and ongoing. What the child does is never enough. “What, only an A-?”
What happens to this child as an adult? They swing back and forth between what Miller calls “Grandiosity and Depression” or as Deresiewicz calls it “Hotshit/piece of shit”. They create a false self to cover much of this up. In the policy world it comes across as “other directed”, maybe philanthropic or as misguided reformism. However in fact what this covers up is an anger, a cynicism, a “Hobbesian competiveness”, a careeristic attitude combined with a false sense of duty that they call leadership.
As a result, they see education through that prism. To many it has become as one student told Deresiewicz, “not far from game theory, an algorithm to be cracked in order to get to the next level.” People don’t go to schools to learn. They go to climb society’s ladder.
Is it a surprise therefore that when the children of this system grow up, that they create data based “measurable virtues” for our children and VATS or APPRs for our teachers? Is it a surprise that they measure students and teachers using algorithms as if it was game theory…with students, parents, and teachers in communities not as well off as theirs as the pawns to be sacrificed as they continue to climb their ladders of success?
Who are we but a mirror of what we have learned over our lifetime coupled with the DNA shake we have been served? We have believed for a long time that the role of high schools and especially colleges was to prepare thinkers. That has morphed into preparing students for the specific discipline they have chosen (or have chosen for them) in which they will immerse themselves for the rest of their lives.
Students arrive pre-molded by the tall tales, myths, legends, values et al. given to them by the institutions of family, community environment, religion, media, and now even more so – social media. As a result we have all seen their propensity to have an opinion on everything. I spent a great deal of time with my students getting them to see the difference between “opinion” and point of view substantiated by research and evidence, not just the evidence the find to support their intuitive opinion. Too often they start with an apriori opinion and simply find the “facts” to support it.
This should sound familiar in dealing with those elite we call education reformers. They “know” schools must reform (and so do we) but they already have their answers based on their lives and the groupthink they all share. The problem is that they have both the influence and money to be heard and supported by those in power until they, themselves, get to those positions of power.
Deresiewicz refers to this groupthink as Plato’s “doxa” and tells us what we already know. “The first purpose of a real education…is to liberate us from “doxa” by teaching us how to recognize it, to question it, and to think our way around it.” As novice teachers in the Bronx, our Platos (my immediate supervisors) taught us that was how to teach social studies. I have been doing that ever since, trying to develop skeptics, not cynics. Our elites, however, are too often cynics who refuse to believe the Platos of their education matter. Why? Because more often than not they distrust everything and everyone but each other because of fear.
More specifically, many, from the time they entered school, were motivated by fear of failure by those institutions that molded them. They think they are leaders, but in fact are only trained to follow with the fear of failing to please the real authority, wherever it lurks, otherwise they fail.
On elite high school and college campuses, remarks Mark Edmundson, author of Why Teach?,
A leader “is someone who in a very energetic, upbeat way, shares all the values of the people who are in charge…. When people say ‘leaders’ now, what they mean is gung ho ‘followers’ ”.
Deresiewicz pleads to colleges to train citizens, not leaders; to train those who ask whether something is worth doing in the first place, rather than just a way to get things done. This is especially true in education policy where the “leaders” have all jumped on the data driven reform train with the rest of the pack, instead of asking whether or not that train is even on the right track.
Are they willing to go against the grain and say, “Hold on a bit, many public schools provide terrific education to their students, maybe we need to use our brains and resources to spread those ideas rather than crush them?” Are they willing to say, “Maybe we should focus on the environmental issues that lead to problems in schools rather than blaming those who work in schools?” And what if they asked, “What if we recognized that teachers, as the real experts in the field (not us), deserve to be heard and have a leadership role in revitalizing American schools, not reforming or destroying them?”
Do they have the courage to go against the au currant grain? Can they change the world for the better by listening to others beside themselves? Can they learn from those who led the positive changes in education 50 or more years ago? Can they figure out that justice, not condescending charity, is a virtue? Can they question their fellow entrephilanthropists and policy makers? Can they admit TFA in its present form is a bad idea, even though one of them created it and it is filled with thousands of them? Can they figure out that doing good doesn’t mean doing well, or becoming a success and getting to the top by doing good?
Now that would be real leadership, wouldn’t it be?
Says Allan Bloom, “ The most successful tyranny is the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” Now I admit, I was never a fan of Allan Bloom, but in this regard he is certainly right about how our elite sheep education reformers have grasped hold of the media and have controlled “the awareness of other possibilities.” From Wendy Kopp to Arne Duncan to Michelle Rhee, all we have heard is how the American Education System is broken and must be replaced. They have convinced the public that teachers are incompetent, lazy, union slugs. Try to convince people otherwise these days. The tyranny is in place and we must overthrow it.
All of the professional training in the schools our excellent sheep-like leaders has made them single-minded. Says William Deresiewicz, “Our rush to efficiency, our addiction to methodologies, and ‘metrics’—testing regimes, protocols…spreadsheets, the management mentality in all its incarnations—[the humanity of] humans has been torn from what they do.”
The professions many of our education reformers, leaders, and philanthropists enter too often ignore that. They are trained with specialized efficiency in mind. They plow ahead with that capacity to do what they believe their job is: to recreate education in this country to resemble how they see it: an efficient, metrics based, testing regime with school leadership based on the management mentality, not a “principal teacher” mentality. It is all they know. It is how they succeeded. Thus, those are the schools and systems they support. Those are the not for profits they support. Those are the charters they support. As much as they believe they are the dissenters, they, in fact are the tyrants who refuse to collaborate with their workers. They refuse to question themselves. They all live in the same “Ghetto of the Mind.” They become the Emperor or Empress with no clothes.
How does all of that effect teaching? These elite leaders who come from the same “Ghetto of the Mind” say that all it takes is to put a great teacher in front of every class and all will be well. Three things are wrong with that. First, most great teachers do not park themselves in front of the room and second, most great teachers don’t fit their concept of greatness. Deresiewicz tells us, “Teaching is not an engineering [STEM] problem. It isn’t a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to another” and teaching test taking strategies so that test scores rise and all of a sudden a school and its teachers are “good”. Finally, third, it takes time and experience for even the most talented teacher to become most talented and SKILLED.
We, in the profession, know what it is. It is mentoring, coaching, prodding, questioning, motivating, inspiring, and awakening. We (and even they) have felt it when it has happened. But because it isn’t quantifiable, our new tyrants can’t listen, even to their own hearts.
Suddenly Teach For America is the answer. Take our best and brightest elite 22 year olds, give them a 5 week training period and watch them perform miracles because they are us, and we are Mormon… oops…I mean we are miracle workers. Don’t our huge incomes show that? Don’t our prestigious positions achieved by the age of 28 show that? Doesn’t that data show that?
As Deresiewicz believes “for all the skill teaching involves, you ultimately only have a single tool: your entire life as you have lived it up until the moment you walk into class.” Like parents, teachers are what they lived as well as what they learned. The best not only bring their knowledge and skilled methods, they bring themselves as human beings. We all know great teaching as soon as we see it. You don’t measure it. You feel it. “It reaches deep inside of you.” It changes your life.
Our excellent sheep tyrants don’t understand, even if they acknowledge all of that when you ask them about their own teachers. They still want to cut the profession down to size and focus on the bad rather than the good. They refuse to pay attention to the vast amount of research that counters their one-track minds. Not only have they removed the “awareness of other possibilities” from others, they have removed it from themselves. How else do you stay a “successful tyranny”?
Our elite leaders in education have left a great deal of what sheep leave everywhere… for others to clean up. One of the big results of an elite education leading to an elite ruling class is just that. It has strengthened, and exacerbated a two-tier class system in this country. Simply put, regardless of what income percentile group you may be in you are either elite or common. You are either them or us. You are either a winner or loser. They compete in everything. They have since elementary school. To them the world is a zero sum game. We can see it in the language they choose to describe premises of their reform movement: COMMON CORE. RACE TO THE TOP.
A bit of history.
Commonizing attempts to make the U.S. more competitive actually started with the use of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management in public (at the time called common) not private schools, during the industrializing economy of the early 20th century. That was when we were “ruled” by the Fords, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and other corporate leaders (Robber Barons) of their day. Their congressional and Presidential henchmen allowed them to rule the economic roost.
For years, most institutions and schools operated under the Frederick Winslow Taylor assumption of a century ago. This assumption presumed that the masses were drones that badly needed coercion, strict instruction, precise direction, and threats with punishment because they fundamentally disliked work and would avoid it if they could. “Work,” Taylor stated, “consists of simple, not particularly interesting tasks. The only way to get people to do them is to incentivize them properly and monitor them carefully”. That is what we often call classroom management. (Think of the straight rows and folded hands on desk total obedience model.) Think of what today’s education policy makers are saying about teachers and how they want them to work.
In education today, it seems as if our reformers still live by the standard of industrial America developed a full century ago by Taylor. Captains of industry (robber barons) supported scientific management, as it was called, in order to make their employees more productive. Their belief in the “mediocrity of the masses” (as supported by empirical testing) has fostered a systemic, algorithmic approach that has made “mediocrity the ceiling of what can be achieved.” Today’s policy makers want to turn teachers into industrial employees, churning students out like Ford workers churned out Model T’s.
Taylor, who as a member of the elite of his era, attended Exeter and was to go to Harvard until his eyesight deteriorated, and his followers turned efficiency into the justification for such changes. The industrial leaders of a century ago believed implementation of scientific management would benefit both workers and society at-large. Today’s policy makers have bought it hook, line, and sinker.
The best example of Frederick Taylor’s ideas at work in education today are high-stakes standardized tests–tests which have a significant effect on funding for schools and the careers of individual students and teachers. Although these exams can create enormous tension for students and administrators, it is teachers whose lives are most affected by them. Thanks to mounting pressure to get students to score high marks, teachers must concentrate on teaching the curricula chosen by test-designers, rather than local school boards or themselves.
The other major example of history repeating itself is in the meaning of “common”. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the primary meaning of “common” is: “Of or relating to a community”. However two other definitions are: “Characterized by a lack of privilege or special status” and “lacking refinement”.
Common Core proponents claim to use the first definition, but given the fact that only public (common) schools are required to follow these “national” standards the latter 2 definitions may actually apply. The elite’s private schools do not have to follow anything common.
CORE can be defined as: – the usually inedible central part of some fruits…I leave the conclusions to you.
All of this produces greater inequity, retards social mobility, and increases the isolation of the elite in our society. As the new ruling class tightens its grip, its members become more and more isolated from “commoners” with the result being a smugness and arrogance they assume is their superiority as “the best an brightest”.
Beware you “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”
William Deresiewicz provides us with some data about our 250 most “selective colleges”
| YEAR | % of students from top quarter of income distribution | % of students from bottom half of income distribution |
| 1985 | 46 | |
| 2000 | 55 | 15 |
| 2006 | 67 | 3 |
“As of 2004, 40% of students from at [even] the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of $100,000 and up…. The decade since, it’s safe to say, has only made the situation worse.”
Once again we can easily track why this happens besides increased tuition. These elite sheep have been manufactured. As every product has it’s production costs, so do they. To pass inspection they must be able to be admitted to the top universities or colleges. What does it cost families to do this? Even without actual dollar amounts we can see how expensive an elite student is to produce.
First, a family must be able to afford either a top-notch private school or live in a community whose public schools are as good or better.
Second, regardless of the quality of the school, these families are convinced they must pay for tutors, test prep, music lessons, paid for community service programs, enrichment camps, sports equipment and travel teams, and any other means necessary to game the system.
Who can afford all of that? We know. So do they. More from Deresiewicz:
Less than half of high scoring SAT students from low income schools even enroll at 4-year schools. Or as Paul Krugman puts it, “ Smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.”
We are not talking about the Roaring Twenties here. “One study found that 100 (.3%) of all US high schools…account for 22% of students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Of those, ALL BUT 6 are private!!!!” (The caps and !!! are mine.)
The universities know too. They know who butters their bread. Even with some new generosity, they must have a certain percentage of “full payers” and need to cater to their donors and “legacies”. They need to service the upper and what they call upper middle-income classes to survive. As a result they produce one big happy family of students, future faculty, funders, administrators, corporate leaders, and policy makers who “know how to do things right” even if they don’t “do the right thing”.
Whew. As a result, doing things right means belonging to a meritocracy. Meritocracy needs data and algorithms. It means success on tests and high scores. It translates into how they decide who is good and who is bad. Anything unmeasurable, by those standards is bad. Funny how that word slipped in.
Why do they do it? They believe it. They have been raised to believe it. They have become it. To deny it would be to deny themselves. This is how they were measured as great. They think their sense of entitlement is due to them because their SAT, AP, GPA, GRE, scores were higher. We are “hot shit”, and that is how you need to become “hot shit” too. Too bad if you cant afford the manufacturing process. They have, too often lost touch with real people. They don’t often grow up with plumbers, electricians, cops, or union members. As a result, their version of service (TFA) and government intervention (Race To The Top and Common Core) is condescending.
They are “excellent sheep” who, for all intents and purposes, have been raised in a bubble pasture. They are what they have been fed. They will seek to raise their lambs in that same protective pasture and create a world based only on what they know. They have merit and everyone else does not. They do everything to justify their own position and ideology.
Ironically, we have seen this all before. E. Digby Baltzell, most noted for his creation of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) wrote in his Protestant Establishment, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privilege to leadership.” According to him, the WASPs reached their peak during another period of extreme excess, the roaring twenties. I will spare you the consequence. I trust you remember.
What do we do now, you ask? We know some level of inequity will always exist. The key as Deresiewicz says “is to prevent that inequality from being handed down.” “Above all it means eliminating inequality in K-12.” That would take equitable funding nationwide or providing low-income families with what they need to compete from the beginning as they do in Finland Canada, and Singapore.
I ask, how can we do that without a change in our excellent sheep who, according to Caitlin Flanagan, “preen ourselves on our progressive views on race, gender, and sexuality, but we blind ourselves to the social division that matters the most, that we guard most jealously, that forms the basis of our comfort, our self respect, and even of our virtue itself: class.”
The answer is Deresiewicz’s. “If we are to create a decent, a just society, a wise and prosperous society where children can learn for the love of learning and people can work for the love of work, then that is what we must believe. We don’t have to love our neighbors as ourselves, but we need to love our neighbor’s children as our own. We have tried meritocracy. Now it is time to try democracy.”
David Greene
Author: Doing The Right Thing: A Teacher Speaks
http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Right-Thing-Teacher-Speaks/dp/1460225481
Save Our Schools Treasurer
TWITTER: @dcgmentor
DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing 
I find your perspective illustrating the life (career) focus of the privileged elite to be thought provoking and fascinating…and a little sad for those in question. Indeed, this socio-economic, political paradigm is a bit sadder for us common folk with common children. Thank you!
Dersiewicz’s book sealed the deal for me. I had always suspected it, experienced it as I moved up from the Bronx in both habitat and work, and then saw the resulting “compromises with liberalism and progressivism?
You describe a scenario much like that of China, where I grew up and had my primary, secondary and college education. I had paid my price for straying off the beaten path even in early childhood. Following well-prescribed order was a matter of survival. My children are American born and our school district is the top rated in PA. Standardized testing is being adopted as performance measurement gold standard for both teachers and pupils. Parents on either side are passionate about their causes. This is the Chinese year of sheep and yours is the first article (that I’ve read) to portray the output of American elite institutions as sheep. Interesting perspective. I’ve just published a book, with parts of it recounting my education experience in China. It’s on Amazon and titled Green Apple Red Book: A Trial and Errors.
Rebecca,
Thank you for those kind words. There is a certain irony to what you say. I would love to read your book. I hope you get a chance to read mine to know how good teaching can break those sheeplike behaviors. DOING THE RIGHT THING: A TEACHER SPEAKS, also on Amazon.
Thank you David. I’m very interested in the topic. I will check out your book.
Thanks. Visa versa as well.
I enjoyed reading this post and agree with you. You may want to reread this paragraph and edit it:
Less than half of high scoring SAT scores are by students from low income schools even enroll at 4-year schools. Or as Paul Krugman puts it, “ Smart poor kids are less likely than dumb rich kids to get a degree.”
Thank you twice. I will go fix that now.
Man if I could just hit like more than once.